Pings for SEO

[chrisgarrett]

One of the people I chatted to, a well known blogger in fact, mentioned pings in the same breath as SEO. I was taken aback.

I thought pinging for SEO benefit was an urban myth. Of course I am willing to be proven wrong, but I have my doubts.

Is there any benefit to pinging in your experience?

[candyaddict]

define pinging. I can think of a few definitions - not sure which one you are referring to.

[c4sr]

define pinging. I can think of a few definitions - not sure which one you are referring to.

I think he means to ping as in push updates to other servers when your blog has updated.

[chrisgarrett]

Yeah that's what I meant, not pingbacks, etc, but pinging pingoat, technorati, et al

[christew]

Pinging is essentially letting other sites know you have new content by 'pinging' them. This is because a site has to actively load up your feed to see there is new content and republish that content in some way (like Technorati does)

So pinging tells them to visit the feed - however, because pinging has been abused so heavily most sites like Technorati now mostly ignore the pings they receive and use other methods to find new feeds and decide themselves how often to check for new content in the feed.

For that reason Pinging is not really worth thinking about.

Its worthwhile to Ping a new site's feed on something like Pingoat just to let sites like Technoarati you exist - but its not really essential as the major sites that index your feed will find you eventually anyway.

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Now what a lot of people confuse pinging with is actually syndicating your feed. The point of pinging is to get sites like Technorati to syndicate your feed, but since Technorati will syndicate your content anyway (although it might take time for a new site) you don't need to ping.

Also pinging can be used to tell Search Engines you have new content.

The benefit of this syndication is it can provide targeted backlinks. Because pinging used to result in guaranteed syndication it became very popular, was quickly abused, and subsequently quickly ignored by the main syndication sites.

But there are plenty of sites out there that will syndicate your content in some way and provide you with targeted backlinks - but you can't just ping them - you have to go and set up an account, page or whatever. For example You could add an RSS feed in a HubPages Hub when you make a Hub, or syndicate your content on sites like Zimbio.

Getting into all the various strategies of using RSS for backlinks is way beyond a forum post - but use your imagination and look around for opportunities and you will see how powerful RSS can be for automating part of your backlinks campaign.

[shayaristore]

Mean of pinging is you want to tell search engines that your site has been updated